Headwind (2001)

  Headwind (2001)

  By: John J Nance

  - - - Synopsis

  Athens, Greece. As a Boeing 737 noses into its gate, its crew is suddenly confronted by Greek officials waiting to arrest one of its passengers, a beloved ex-president of the United States, John Harris. Believing Harris's life is in danger, Captain Craig Dayton stages a daring escape by backing the jet away from the gate without clearance and taking off down a vacant runway. The dilemma for Captain Dayton and his precious cargo is that Peru has signed an Interpol Warrant for President Harris's arrest, using the same treaty employed by Spain to extradite former Chilean dictator Pinochet. The Peruvian government alleges that Harris is personally responsible for a supposed CIA-led strike against a biological weapons factory during his term of office. But Harris's--and the U.S. State Department's--nightmare is this: There is no place to hide because every nation in the Pan-American federation has signed the treaty and any one of them must honor the warrant and give Peru what it wants: a presidential pawn to humiliate on the international stage. Captain Dayton flies Harris and his crew on an against-the-clock mission to find a safe haven--from Greece to Sicily to Ireland--while Harris's rumpled and outgunned lawyer wrestles an international team of legal sharks snapping at their biggest prize yet.

  - - -

  ONE

  Gate 35, Athens International Airport, Greece—Monday—2:00 P.M.

  “Captain, I think you’d better get back here!” the chief flight attendant said as she burst into the cockpit.

  Captain Craig Dayton snapped his head around and began reaching for his seat belt as soon as he saw the worried expression on Jillian Walz’s face.

  “What’s the matter?” Dayton asked, aware that his copilot had shifted around in the right seat to look at her as well.

  Jillian shut the door and stood in the tiny space aft of the center console, breathing hard and signaling him to wait. She watched a police car pull up on the ramp of the newly opened airport and stop in front of their Boeing 737, its blue lights flashing. Dayton followed her gaze and spotted the patrol car.

  “We’re about to get in the middle of a diplomatic crisis,” Jillian said. “The gate agent . . .”

  A voice on the overhead speakers cut her short. “Flight forty-two, operations.”

  The copilot lifted his handheld microphone. “Go ahead, ops.”

  “We will have to hold you at the gate for a while, forty-two.”

  “Why?” the copilot asked sharply, noting the arrival of a second police car on the ramp.

  “Forty-two, there is an official order . . . ah . . . wait, please . . .”

  The microphone in the operations office remained on while urgent voices conferred in the background. “Ah . . . we will have to remove some of your passengers.”

  Jillian nodded rapidly, her words tumbling out. “Craig, they’re here to arrest President Harris!”

  Craig Dayton clasped Jillian’s right elbow as he searched her eyes. “Slow down, Jillian, and tell me precisely what you’re talking about.”

  The day had started in Istanbul with the exciting news that a former President of the United States would be riding with them in first class through Athens to Rome. Fresh from delivering a speech to an international conference on hunger, President John B. Harris had come aboard with an attractive young female aide and an appropriately dour Secret Service agent, greeting the crew warmly at the door and even sticking his head into the cockpit to say hello. Impeccably groomed, and wearing a well-tailored dark business suit that made him seem taller than his five-foot-ten height, Harris had proven to be as friendly and gracious as the Washington press corps had always described him during his almost legendary single term in office.

  “Our agent . . . gate agent . . . I know her,” Jillian was saying. “She came down the jetway all upset and said the Greek government has a warrant for his arrest.”

  “Why? What for?”

  She shook her head, creating a moving blur of chestnut hair. “She didn’t know.”

  First Officer Alastair Chadwick whistled and inclined his head toward the ramp, where a third and fourth police car had parked, all with their top lights flashing frantically. “Something’s definitely up, mate.”

  “This is a foreign-flagged airliner,” Dayton said. “No one’s removing any passenger without my permission.” He motioned to Jillian to reopen the cockpit door as he moved the captain’s seat back on its tracks and prepared to get up, filling the air with the aroma of peanuts as the contents of an opened snack pouch scattered on the metal floor.

  “Damn.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Jillian said.

  The copilot caught his arm.

  “Craig, you remember I’m a solicitor in my other life in England, right?”

  “Yes, I know,” Craig said, his eyes on Jillian as she stepped out.

  “A little free legal advice, okay? You’re an American national with a European work visa, you’re the master of a German-flagged airliner, and that airliner is currently sitting on Greek concrete. You’re not the U.S. ambassador. They could arrest you for getting in the way.”

  The captain shook his head impatiently. “This is Greece, Alastair. They’ve been civilized for at least a few years now. About two or three thousand, in fact.”

  “Craig?” Chadwick tightened his grip on the captain’s arm, and Dayton responded with irritation.

  “WHAT?”

  “Be careful, okay? I know he’s your President, but you can’t protect him.”

  “No?” There was a flurry of movement as Craig Dayton resumed the process of hauling himself out of the seat. “Just watch me!”

  TWO

  Rome, Italy—Monday—1:00 P.M.

  The Presidential Suite of the Metropole Hotel in the center of Rome was designed for kings and presidents and captains of industry, but despite the opulence of its decor, the most valuable feature to its occupant was a portable phone and plenty of floor to pace.

  “Dammit, man, where are they? You are still in Athens, are you not?”

  Sir William Stuart Campbell, a Scot by birth and a knight of the British Empire by deft political maneuvering, reversed direction without warning and strode briskly toward the ten-foot-high windows opening onto an ornate balcony overlooking the Via Veneto. The doors to the balcony stood aside as a warm breeze flowed in, redolent with the essence of fresh flowers and the fragrance of a busy nearby bakery, but leavened with a hint of exhaust fumes from the midday traffic—all of it lost to the intensity of Campbell’s concentration.

  “Mister Kostombrodis!” Campbell barked, his polished accent worthy of an Oxford don, which he had been at one time in his endlessly distinguished legal career. “My dear sir, I was under the distinct, but apparently misguided impression that we had retained you to keep track of them moment by moment, and that was to include the moment they left the court and headed for the airport. Is it really so difficult to follow instructions?”

  A conservatively dressed young woman wearing a sexless gray suit and a worried expression entered the room, her eyes tracking the imposing hulk of the six-foot-four international lawyer with the wariness of a jackal. She calculated his next trajectory across the forty-foot expanse of the vaulted room and waited.

  “You are virtually certain, are you not,” Campbell was saying into the phone, “that they have a certified copy of the Interpol warrant in their possession?”

  Campbell turned and caught sight of the secretary, who signaled him with a nod of her head. He nodded in return and raised an index finger in a wait gesture.

  “Yes. Yes. I understand. The second you’re certain they have him physically off that aircraft, ring me back. Is that perfectly clear? Whether he’s arrested in Athens or here in Rome is a small
matter, but having up-to-the-second information on what is happening is a very large matter. Yes. See that you do.”

  He punched off the phone and collapsed the small antenna in a controlled gesture of disdain, rolling his eyes as he looked at the woman and smiled. “Yes, Isabel?”

  “The foreign minister has arrived, sir.”

  “Show him in, please,” Campbell said, gesturing toward the door as his distinctive features melted into a broad smile, the effect similar to opening a curtain on a sunny day.

  A short, rotund man in a dark suit scurried through the ten-foot-high double doors at the far end of the room and moved across the eighty-year-old Persian carpet as Campbell came to greet him, clasping his right hand and clapping him on the shoulder in a seamless gesture only a larger man could use with such practiced grace.

  “Giuseppe, how good of you to come. It’s wonderful to see you again.”

  Giuseppe Anselmo, the foreign minister of Italy, managed a thin smile as he returned the greeting and accepted a proffered chair next to an ornate couch. A waiter materialized silently with an elaborate silver service of coffee and tea as Campbell inclined his eyes toward the door.

  “Close the balcony doors and leave us now, would you?” Campbell instructed. “And be good enough to secure the main door.”

  The waiter sealed off the balcony, muting the traffic noise as a previously drowned background track of classical music swelled into prominence.

  Campbell reached for a remote control and lowered the volume.

  When the waiter was gone, Anselmo shook his head and leaned forward, keeping his voice irritatingly low.

  “Giuseppe,” Campbell smiled, wagging a finger at him, then tapping his ear. “Sorry, old boy, but I think I might be growing a bit deaf in my dotage. May I ask you to speak up? There are no other ears around, I assure you.”

  “I was saying,” Anselmo repeated in a louder voice as he scooted forward to the edge of the chair, “that this puts us in a very difficult position. Unofficially, of course.”

  “Of course. Treaty obligations are often inconvenient, but are you aware of what Peru’s complaint against Harris really contains?”

  Campbell poured the steaming coffee into one of the expensive gold leaf cups, making mental note of the rich aroma of the special blend he always specified. British or not, he loved rich coffee.

  “I have read it, Stuart. Yes.”

  “Excellent. Then you realize that the Peruvian government made a substantial case to the Peruvian judge who properly issued the arrest warrant under Interpol procedure. President Harris is directly, criminally, personally responsible.”

  Anselmo was shaking his head. “We do not believe that, and I doubt you do either.”

  “Let’s look at the facts, Giuseppe. We know there was a clandestine intelligence operation eighty miles from Lima during Harris’s presidency. We know the targeted building contained some sixty-three men and women, and that regardless of what they were alleged to be making in there, they were, in fact, tortured and, three days later, burned alive.”

  “Stuart, I . . .”

  “Wait, please. Permit me to finish. We also know the American CIA commissioned the operation with local thugs, and we know that commission was the result of a covert operation that could have only been authorized personally by the President of the United States.”

  “But you have no direct proof of that, Stuart!”

  “Giuseppe, as a lawyer, you know we’ve got a rock-solid prima facie case under the Treaty Against Torture. The warrant is valid. It will be up to a trial court to decide if the proof is sufficient. And by the way, we do have the proof, though I’m not prepared to discuss it at this time.”

  Giuseppe Anselmo reached out and tapped Campbell’s forearm with his index finger. “Why are you representing them, Stuart?” His eyes were riveted on Campbell’s. “You have a thriving practice in Brussels. Your firm represents half of the truly successful companies in Europe. You’re very wealthy now. Why take on the United States in a crusade you can’t win?”

  “Is that what you believe this to be?” he smiled. “A crusade?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Of course not! Giuseppe, the only point is that no one on this planet is above the law when it comes to this treaty and the hideous crimes it seeks to prevent. No person may escape universal jurisdiction. No peasant, no king, no president . . .”

  “Please, Stuart! Save your speeches for television,” Anselmo snapped. “I am quite aware that you wrote the majority of the treaty and were the driving force behind passing it and getting it ratified. I am aware of your role in trying to extradite Pinochet.”

  “I am Peru’s lawyer in this matter,” Campbell interrupted, “because they have a valid case, as horrifying as that may be to our American friends.”

  “But Stuart . . . Peru? No one’s going to take this seriously.”

  “Peru is not the issue, Giuseppe. The United States is the issue. You and I are rather familiar with the American attitude that they’re only subject to international jurisdiction when it’s convenient.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Need I remind you of the U.S. Navy’s flight through the ski lift cable?”

  “No.”

  “Or the arrogant legal response to your requests to try the pilots under Italian law?”

  “Of course I am aware of all that!” Anselmo answered with a scowl. “That’s one of the many reasons my government finally collapsed last year and we had to go through elections. It is rather ungracious of you to remind me.”

  Campbell sipped his coffee and glanced through floor-to-ceiling windows at blue skies beyond the balcony, purposefully letting silence hang between them for a few moments before looking back at him.

  “I would never mean to be ungracious to you, old friend,” he said, shifting to flawless Italian. “But the fact is, if I were representing the United States and asking Rome to enforce a warrant for the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, you would not hesitate.”

  “Now, look here, Stuart . . .” Anselmo continued in English.

  “Giuseppe, the fact is, about thirty minutes ago my associates left a magistrate court right here in Rome with a signed warrant for the police to arrest President Harris when he lands at Da Vinci Airport. The judge is prepared to hold immediate hearings tomorrow on our petition for expedited extradition to Peru.”

  “What?”

  “There will be a plane waiting, you see.”

  “What are you doing, Stuart?”

  “Why, being a good lawyer for my client, of course.”

  “But . . . extradition hearings take months, if not longer! How did you convince . . .”

  “There will be appeals by the U.S., of course, but we’re going to demand immediate extradition to Lima for trial. We would appreciate your government’s assistance in cutting through any official delays. Otherwise, under the treaty, I will be forced to insist that Italy try Harris itself.”

  Anselmo made a short, rude, staccato sound as he shook his head. “In your wildest imagination, Stuart, can you imagine the government of Italy putting an American President on trial for alleged crimes committed in a backwater of South America?”

  Campbell shook his head slowly, a smile on his lips. “No, Giuseppe, which is why you do not want this problem in town any longer than necessary. If it comes here, I will help you make it go away, as the Americans say.”

  “Excuse me,” Giuseppe said, his eyes lighting with the possibility of deliverance. “If? His itinerary is uncertain?”

  Stuart Campbell nodded. “I’m managing this from Rome, but at this moment, Harris’s flight is being detained at the Athens Airport pending the arrival of the proper authorities. If they succeed, they’ll relieve you of this potentially vexatious burden. If the Greeks fail, however, John Harris will be arrested on arrival here.”

  “And what if he elects to go somewhere else?” Anselmo asked with undisguised sarcasm.

  The senior partner of Campb
ell, Chastane, and McNaughton smiled.

  “Giuseppe, have you ever known me to take inordinate risks? At this moment, I have associates with certified copies of the Peruvian Interpol warrant waiting with cell phones in virtually every nation in Europe in anticipation of just such a possibility. But I’m fully expecting to hear good news from Athens any minute.”

  As if on cue, the portable phone at his side began ringing.

  THREE

  Athens International Airport, Athens, Greece—Monday—2:10 P.M.

  All the baggage had been loaded and the passengers boarded by the time seven Greek police officers gathered in the jetway outside EuroAir Flight 42 and Captain Craig Dayton appeared in the doorway of the airplane.